Cristobal Young
The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight
In this age of globalization, many countries are worried about the tax flight of the rich. As income inequality grows and countries consider raising taxes on their wealthiest residents, there is a palpable concern that these high rollers will board their private jets and fly away, taking their wealth with them. Many assume that the importance of location to a person’s success is at an all-time low.
Cristobal Young has conducted the first-ever large-scale study of migration of the world’s richest individuals, drawing on special access to over 45 million US tax returns, Forbes lists and census records. He shows that contrary to popular opinion, although the rich have the resources and capacity to flee high-tax places, their actual migration is surprisingly limited. Place still matters, even in today’s globalized world.
Cristobal Young is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Educated at the University of Victoria, Canada and at Princeton University, his work now focuses on the overlapping fields of economic sociology, stratification, and quantitative methodology. He studies the social policies that moderate income inequality, ranging from millionaire taxes to unemployment insurance. His methodological work focuses on big administrative data, model uncertainty, and robust results. In addition to numerous op-eds in leading newspapers and many articles in learned journals, he is the author of The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich (2017).
Dr. Dieter Plehwe is a researcher at the Center for Civil Society Research in the Berlin Social Science Center.